Masaaki Kumagai and Takaya Ochiai at the Robot Development Engineering Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan have developed a robot that can balance on a ball – even while carrying heavy loads. While this might at first just seem like a cool trick, it also shows how a robot could be designed to be omni-directional by traveling using a ball, rather than simple wheels.

This is pretty awesome – imagine it as a waiter like R2D2 in Return of the Jedi. Except better – R2 had to work to avoid walls and other obstacles, while this robot would be able to quickly dodge any that come at it.

There are, of course, tons of other uses besides waiter – I work at a place where we unload a lot of stock and then move it around in our warehouse. Being able to just set a flat of product on a robots head and have it move the stock to where it needs to go would be awesome.
Anyhow, check out the video below of it in action!

Thanks to Stacy at She Dreams in Digital for the Video and tip-off!!